


if i'm your darling (then kill me)

by makethegirlmad



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Cobb is a control freak, Cobb is an asshole, F/M, Mal's POV, movie prequel, trigger warning: slightly abusive relationship undertone, ugh Mal you deserve so much better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 04:02:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2908625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/makethegirlmad/pseuds/makethegirlmad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From daughter, to wife, to mother, to shade. Mallorie Cobb, at your service.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if i'm your darling (then kill me)

**Author's Note:**

> At long last. Mal Cobb's redemption fic.
> 
> 1\. What we know of Mal is what Cobb PROJECTS of Mal. Let's face it, the real Mal was probably kickass and a prodigy and clever and kind. Not clingy and codependent and obsessive. 
> 
> 2\. My life got 200% better when I realized that Cobb's projection of Mal speaks for how Cobb subconsciously WANTS Mal to be, not how she actually was. I laughed. And then I cried. And then I got angry. Ergo: fic.
> 
> 3\. Basically what I'm saying is that Cobb is an asshole who violated his wife. People think SHE'S crazy?? LOOK AT HER OBSESSIVE HUSBAND.
> 
> 4\. I do not own these characters, they belong to Christopher Nolan, yadda yadda yadda don't sue me.

 

 

 

 

There's an old Japanese myth, about a man who lived in a cave, who craved his dead wife so much that he fell into an eternal sleep so he could be with her in his dreams.

This is not that story.

 

 

 

 

 

The law of dreams is to stay in motion.

Mal's dreams are hazy and gray in childhood, and she can't really remember the subject matter for most of them. Dreams become more vivid with time, she supposes, so it's easier to brush the past away.

Mal grows up in the south of France, where tulips bloom in her mother's spice garden every spring. She grows up in a house with windows that look like eyes. She grows up with rain and flowers and forests but she dreams of the ocean, of the sleeping cities that lie on the horizon.

 

 

 

 

 

When she's young, her papa buys her a beautiful pink doll house. One two three four five six, and she'd been _Mallorie_ then, already obsessed with houses, with the neat and tidy sprawling of them, the planning and structure, how walls can bend and shift and how roofs can arch inwards, sloped guardians of safety.

Her father is English but her mother is French, and Mal grows up learning both, her tongue rolling on the r's, tapping out her t's in tiny rasps. Her mother had told her that her accent was beautiful, so Mal keeps it in her throat, rasping and melodic.

(It's the only part of her mother she has left.)

Her father is a professor of architecture and has a teaching position at the local college in town, and her mother stays at home with her, playing with her dolls and sweeping floors and making delicious, thick soups with spices from the garden. Her beautiful mother dies when she is ten, and years later Mal will try reconstructing her in a dream just to see her face again. That is a mistake. You should never build with memories. Reality fades with time, that way. It wears off.

When Mal remembers her childhood, it goes like this: rain on windowsills, a house with windows for eyes, a beautiful dollhouse in her room, her mother's voice echoing in the kitchen. She is safe. She is safe. She is safe.

 

 

 

 

 

The law of dreams is to keep in motion.

After her mother dies, Mal's father moves them out of their beautiful little house with its beautiful little garden and into Paris, Paris, _Paris,_ where the architecture is louder and blocky and triangular, squeezed into different dimensions. Paris is casual and grandiose towers and castles, twisting Gothic spears spiraling into the sky, spires that Mal finds herself sketching in the corner of cafe napkins and newspapers. Paris is filthy and gorgeous, filled with rats on the street and chestnut horse blossoms and poetry.

Here Mal studies under her father's watchful gaze, walking to school with her books clutched under her arm. Paris, she is told, is the most beautiful city in the world, and she believes it--but still, every night, she dreams of the little house and the little garden her mother had loved, the smell of tulips and rain.

She tries drawing it from memory once, but she can't--the house is made of crumbling stone and it turns to dust in her pictures, the details blurred, charcoal smudged, and Mal cries.

(In dreams--in limbo--she can reconstruct it perfectly.)

 

 

 

 

 

The law of dreams is to keep in motion.

Mal enters college dreaming of buildings and skyscrapers that touch the heavens, enrolls in her father's old architecture program, and the beam on his face tells her that he is so happy, so proud. She sits in beautiful old rooms with high, vaulted domes for ceilings and draws and draws and draws, fails her assignments, listens to her teachers waddle on and on and on about the limitations of her creations, how her buildings don't fall in line with reality, the absurdity of her structures.

Every weekend she goes home to her father, frustrated, slamming her books down on the table and swearing in French.

"I want to create what _I_ want. What's stopping me from doing that?" Mal is level-headed and has never thought herself impatient but she feels the frustration of a thousand _no's_ to her face, impossibilities, improbabilities, impracticalities. Mal glares at her sketches, the misaligned measurements in her blueprints, and Mal _hates._

Miles looks at her with a smile in his eyes, "Mallorie, darling," he says, "if I let you in on a secret that would help you do exactly that, would you promise me you won't tell a soul?"

 

 

 

 

 

The law of dreams is to keep in motion.

Her father gets his hands on a PASIV device, plugs her in with him, and--and it's _incredible_ the first time.Mal makes ceilings as high as she wants, buildings that line up perfectly in her head but never on paper, cobblestone streets. Mal loves round things, round arches and buildings and spaces, loves the echo of them and the feel, so she cuts the corners off of everything, knocks off straight lines and makes them curve, builds and builds and builds on her impracticalities until she's dizzy. It's an addictive process.

Her father's cities are always pointier, more sharply angled. Pyramids over squares. And then ovals, blended, somehow more stark than the points. Her father laughs with her, and at the end of the hour they sit together on a balcony, watching their respective kingdoms sprawl, and the city spills out, and the city spills out, and the city spills out.

 

 

 

 

 

Her father is adamant about using the PASIV strictly for creative processes, but one day Mal sneaks away at night and plugs herself in, dives deep into her own mind, alone down there for the first time, and is terrified by what she finds.

There are dark corners in her city, secrets locked away in vaults and buildings. Mal walks through the world she created, and for once is truly frightened. The streets unravel from the center like cobbled spider webs, tapering off into thin pedestrian walkways, covered in shadow, alleyways that give her a sense of foreboding.

"The mind is a reflection of who you are," her father had told her, but Mal does not know this side of herself, this deep and dangerous side, and she thinks, perhaps my mind is trying to tell me something.

She wakes up then, and tries to forget about it.

 

 

 

 

 

Her father marries again. His new wife is a nice woman and Mal finds that she is able to find love in her heart for her, but she is not _mama_ and Mal doesn't think it's a sin to love her real mother, her first mother, more. Her father tries to replace her mother with another woman, and she does not hate him for it, it's his perfect right, but Mal doesn't want a replacement. She doesn't want cheap imitation copies. She wants the original, the  _reality._

(That will change. One day she will prefer the other.)

 

 

 

 

 

It's Mal's idea to use tokens, because sometimes her subconscious accidentally draws up her mother's face and it looks too real.

Mal gathers the bits and pieces of her mother up and places her in the little house with windows for eyes and Mal feels her presence in every room, walking through the garden, singing a lullaby.

Sometimes she cannot tell which world is real, and that frightens her, so Mal makes a top, smooth and perfect, spins it on a table. In dreams it keeps spinning, spins forever.

This is how. This is how she knows. This is what she tells herself: there are two worlds. There is one that is real. And there is one that you wish could be real.

 

 

 

 

 

A year goes by, and Mal drinks martinis and expensive lattes and pages through books that earn her impressed glances. Paris changes her, makes her into someone sophisticated, and so Mal reads and draws buildings on her napkins and travels and goes home to dream with her father.

One day her papa takes home a student.

Sandy hair, blue eyes. She can tell he's an American from the way he walks in, and oh, he is young. He is so young.

The boy blushes when he sees her.

"Mallorie, this is Dominic Cobb. He's one of my best students. He'll be working with me with the PASIV."

"The PASIV is only for you and I," Mal protests, "and for _creative purposes!"_

"Things change, Mallory," her father scolds her, and Mal glares at the boy. He seems to shrink at her gaze, but doesn't take his eyes off her. "Don't worry. Dom will keep our secret, won't you, Dom?"

And Dom nods, frantic. "Yes, sir."

Mal shakes her head at him and they walk into the next room. She seems them later again, plugged in. The boy is breathing sharply, eyelids moving rapidly, like a bad dream, like a nightmare.

She can see the veins under his skin. Mal reaches her hand out to clutch his bony shoulder, wonders whether she should shake him awake. He murmurs something, pained and choked-off.

She decides against it, lets her hand fall. Sometimes people need to work through their own demons. Sometimes bad dreams are necessary.

 

 

 

 

 

The boy--Dom--keeps coming over. He gains confidence with every visit. He asks her name. He asks her out. He asks her to love him. He asks her hand in marriage.

That last one is a lie.

He takes her hand and--and Mal's brow furrows, can't remember ever giving it to him--and slides a ring on her finger.

"We'll grow old together," he tells her, in earnest, and Mal ignores the twinge of annoyance inside, can only nod her head.

It's not like she wouldn't have said yes, but he never _asked._

 

 

 

 

 

The law of dreams is to keep in motion.

Miles lets his daughter run off with his student, lets them dream together, minds entwined like iron bands, and Mal opens her eyes in her fiance's world: blocks of grey cement, a vast city by the seascape, sand and concrete and perfectly uniform buildings organized by height and shape.

There is a monotonous beauty to it, Mal knows--but Cobb's skyscrapers are so tall they block out the sun, and Mal can't breathe in their shadows.

 

 

 

 

 

Cobb loves her better in dreams. Mal knows this for a fact. Dreams are something he can control, and he loves control. Mal is something he cannot control, except in dreams.

He sees her and touches her and smiles, wide, but when they are in dreams everything is more vivid, and he is happier, she is happier, they are both happier.

One day, she holds back. She closes her eyes and dreams of her little house in the French countryside, out of place among all the blocky gray buildings and tall skyscrapers, and when Cobb catches up to her he shakes his head.

"Mal, there's no place for that here." He gestures, wide, his hands encompassing his kingdom, the city he'd built out of cement and stone and steel. Mal shrugs.

"I thought you might like some color," she tells him. She looks back at her little red brick house, perfectly constructed from her memory.

(She can only recreate it in dreams.)

Cobb's frown grows deeper. "It's not the way this works," he says, a paranoid edge to his voice, and suddenly Mal is tired, so tired of the way he loves her, nearing a dangerous obsession some days, discarding and ignoring her on others.

She lives in his fucking margins. It's not fair. She deserves to _be_ something.

 _You only love me when I'm convenient,_ she thinks to him, but on the outside she smiles. "This place is important to me," she says, and gestures to the house. His gaze follows her hand, inquisitive. They stand together and stare at the little house some more before he tells her to tear it down.

This is how. This is how she gave him the key to unraveling her.

 

 

 

 

 

The law of dreams is to keep in motion.

She has children with Cobb, a beautiful pair, and Mal could spend hours holding them in her arms, marveling at their perfection. Nothing in the world she created, in dreams or on paper, can compare.

She names her daughter Phillipa after her mother, and Dom names their son James. Phillipa and James, Mal and Dom, beautiful pairs. There are patterns in buildings and there are patterns in reality, and Mal lives her life in twos now, two perfect pairs and two perfect children.

Mal still draws buildings in her margins, but now they resemble Cobb's: angular and structural, made for functionality instead of aesthetics. Flat, gray cement, where colorful Gothic spires used to be, round rooms and concaves. She wonders when his mind started bleeding into her own. She wonders if it's possible that he... _changed_ her, in some way.

She puts it out of her mind. She trusts her husband. Cobb would never dare. Not consciously, anyway. Sharing mindspace, sharing dreamspace, it changes people. His designs are overwhelming, and Mal so rarely designs her own buildings anymore. It makes sense that she'd be more like him, in this way.

(But she keeps the little red brick house, because other than her accent it is the only part of her mother she has left. Mal clings to her, the spice garden, the tulips in the spring, the rain in September.)

 

 

 

 

 

Dom presents the idea to her after dinner, after they've put James and Phillipa to bed, while she is doing the dishes: limbo. Eternal, raw subconscious. Pure creation.

"Think of all we could build, Mal, the--the theories and the rules will never apply down there," Cobb says, and in his voice is the reveling tone that had convinced Mal to love him, to marry him. "There's a whole world down there that nobody's ever _seen_ before."

Mal only smiles at him. "It sounds beautiful," she reassures, and it does.

 

 

 

 

 

The law of dreams is to keep in motion.

They go under: the first level, the second, the third, the fourth. Mal is not afraid. Dom will protect her.

She takes his hand and he smiles at her. They go down together.

They will wake up in a few hours, and nothing will have changed. Mal trusts him. She does. Everything will be alright. They'll wake up, to their house, to their children, to their lives. Everything will be alright.

 

 

 

 

 

Mal wakes up in cold saltwater, swirling. "Cobb," she gasps, and then louder: "Cobb! Cobb!"

He appears next to her, gasping and coughing. They cling to each other, stumbling onto the warm sand. Mal's lips are dry. She looks up, gasping for air, watches the way the sun glints off the city they built.

"Dom," she whispers, and he looks at her. "Dom, we're here. We made it." The sun is warm on their wet backs, and Mal dares to smile, and then laugh. "We made it."

She has their city, and she has--she has their creation, she has their kingdom and their sun, and she has her husband who she trusts, and _everything_ will be alright.

Mal spins the top, and it keeps spinning.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
